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Tiny proportion of Russians attend church on Pascha

Posted: Thursday May 05, 2005 5:30 PM EST

By Alesei Muraviev Portal-credo.ru

Easter Statistics And Orthodoxy Of The Future

Russia—It was on Pascha that it became clear what form of Orthodoxy will survive in Russian society.

It is probably hard to find nowadays an Orthodox clergyman who would not complain about the “popular cemetery Easter.” It long ago became habitual among the servants of the altar to wearily express dissatisfaction that a great multitude of citizens, disdaining church services, flock on the days of the Easter season to cemeteries, where amongst the graves that are by no means always adorned with an Orthodox cross they indulge themselves in moderate (and not so moderate) libations and relish some Easter eggs. The most zealous priests even call such folk “grave worshippers.”

As competent offices of the State Department of Internal Affairs report (and for Easter there were 20,000 police officers in Moscow), approximately 680,000 persons visited cemeteries in the city--500,000 on Easter Sunday and another 180,000 on the Saturday before. This is more than a year ago when “only” 640,000 visited the cemeteries.

These figures bear witness that the number of our fellow citizens who are concerned about the linkage of the ages and their relations with deceased ancestors is growing. And if one views the process most abstractly, then one can see a positive aspect to it. If we will assess the processes that are occurring in the spiritual life of the population of contemporary Russia, not from the point of view of dogmatic Orthodoxy, but from the point of view of the sociological realities, then we will have to recognize that this is the national religion and its chief component, “love for ancestral graves,” is the “Orthodoxy” that is now being reborn throughout all of Russia. The Orthodoxy for the nation is simply the “religion of our ancestors.”

According to data of the same department, 359,000 persons attended Pascha services in Moscow.  These are just those who came to gaze at the procession of the cross; only 80,000 persons in all stayed for worship at the evening services. If we compare this with the size of the population of Moscow, the proportion is not especially impressive. However, the number of people who are prepared to last through the long evening services and prepare themselves carefully for the sacrament and listen attentively to the teachings of the holy fathers that are read at the Pascha service has never been substantial. By way of comparison, we recall that in 2000, no more than 120,000 persons attended church for worship (and not just to spectate), and in 1992-1994, it was 180,000. In 2002 the Ministry of Internal Affairs predicted that approximately 15 million people throughout the country would participate in all Easter events, including Passion Sunday, Pascha, Bright Week, and Radonitsa (Commemoration of the Dead); that is barely more than ten percent of the population. Data for other regions confirm the same picture; for the chief Orthodox feast day, at least according to information from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and provincial administrations, between one half and two percent of the population attend church. This would be a more or less realistic figure of the number of citizens who are receptive to something more than “popular Orthodoxy.”

Back at the end of 2003 Patriarch Alexis lamented in his address to the Moscow diocesan meeting:  “Churches are empty. And they are not empty just because the number of churches has multiplied. It is a natural process and will continue.” This is something especially to regret. Ever fewer people are ready to go to church because it is an activity that is too far removed from the daily lives that people live, and the social mechanisms that lead them to see in church activity a way of being liberated from dreary existence are still not working. Or they have ceased working.

At the same time “popular Orthodoxy,” with its cult of the dead, traditional foods, ritual drinking, and the like, has always intermingled with church Orthodoxy. This is why it is extremely difficult to arrive at objective statistics of how many people celebrate Pascha. On one hand, a great number of people celebrate it, but on the other hand the majority of these people are more likely attracted to “popular Orthodoxy,” and not to the Orthodoxy of church dogma. It is this “popular Orthodoxy” that is now being socially called for, and the church’s success in evangelism will depend on the extent to which it is able successfully to incorporate this “popular Orthodoxy” into its activities.

The question about the salvation and restoration of humanity by Christ, which constitutes the main message of Pascha for those who are “profoundly churched” Orthodox Christians , is simply impossible to comprehend because it deals with doctrines that are sublime and hard to understand and difficult to explain without employing special concepts and preliminary training. This is why popular Orthodoxy has been and remains the only possible kind of Orthodoxy for the enormous mass of people.

At present one cannot see the peculiar preconditions for the assimilation by the mass of people of a different understanding of Orthodoxy that approximates a church, dogmatic understanding. One should not expect them to form in the near future. Although as they say, falsehood, truth, and statistics are three different things, and the “cemetery church folk” give irrefutable evidence of some kind of variation in Orthodoxy in the future.

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